Young Mexican writers bid farewell to magical realism

When Latin American literature began to make inroads outside of
Spanish-speaking circles, it was the magical spell of tropical worlds that drew
readers from Europe and North America.

In 1967, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez raised the mythical town of
Macondo to international heights with his novel One Hundred Years of
Solitude. In 1982 he won the Nobel literature prize.

The trend Garcia Marquez set off became known as the Latin
American-literature ``boom'' and many authors sold large numbers of books, among
them Mexican Carlos Fuentes and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. Taking into account
the differences in their works, these authors had one thing in common: the tales
they told were mostly based in their own countries.

Things are changing now. Mexican writer Jorge Volpi was born a year after
Garcia Marquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude. Together with
his fellow Mexican writers of approximately the same age - Ignacio Padilla,
Pedro Angel Palou, Eloy Urroz and Vicente Herrasti - Volpi represents a new
generation of writers who no longer want much to do with ``magical realism''.
Moreover, their novels are often set in places far away from their countries.

Nonetheless, they continue to consider Garcia Marquez as one of their models,
together with Thomas Mann, William Faulkner and Herman Melville. These
thirty-something writers like to describe themselves as the ``crack
generation'', meaning they've broken with literary conventions that have
dominated their own native literary scene.

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Novelists elsewhere in South America are following similar paths. In Chile,
the young writers movement is called ``McOndo''- a play on Macondo and
McDonalds.

Volpi's Spanish-language novel Looking For Klingsor has been
translated into 16 languages. In the spy thriller involving German nuclear
physicists, action takes place during World War Two and the years afterward.
Volpi displays great knowledge of German history and of mythology. Padilla's
Anphitrion and Herrasti's Diorama are also set in Europe.

``Volpi was, shall we say, our spearhead,'' Herrasti told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur in an interview. He added that the new Mexican literature really
took off when Volpi received Spain's Seix Barral prize in 1999 for Looking
for Klingsor.

The ``crack generation'' has had to fend off criticism through the years,
especially within Mexico itself, for the type of literature it is creating.
Critics have even charged that they were not ``true'' Mexican writers, because
of their choice of topics.

But one veteran Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, 73, a distinguished member of
the ``boom'' generation, has words of praise and labels the new trend the
``junior boom''.

Herrasti said he and his fellow writers actually have nothing against the
``magical realism'' writers per se - the older writers such as Fuentes and
Garcia Marquez, who are their literary ``grandfathers''.

It is their literary ``parents'' they object to, Herrasti said - writers who
imitated the ``magical realism'' bent. He included in that category his fellow
Mexican writer Laura Esquivel and Chilean writer Isabel Allende.

Most of the Mexican ``crack generation'' writers met each other at
university. After his literary success, Volpi was appointed Mexico's cultural
attache at the embassy in Paris. Padilla serves in the same capacity in London.

Pedro Palou, who stayed in Mexico, pointed out that ``magical realism'', in
which reality and fantasy are intertwined, is not just purely Latin American. He
mentioned writers such as E T A Hoffmann and Franz Kafka.

Palou won't go as far as pronouncing ``magical realism'' dead, even though he
and his colleagues no longer use that narrative form.

``What has died is the dictatorship of the 'boom' followers who imitated them
ad nauseam and managed to reduce their literature to a (mere) formula,'' he
said.